QUIET LINE/HILJAINEN VIIVA: First it walked, then the patterns got more complicated, and finally it thinned out again.

Caitlin Corbett Dance Company, which was celebrating its 25th anniversary at the Tsai Center last weekend, achieved another of its people-dance successes, a two-part series of one-minute duets featuring 36 big, small, awkward, suave, surprising, funny, and raring-to-go dancers and non-dancers of all ages. Corbett sent out a call for participants, who were to bring their own minute of music. She would do the rest. Together they created a miniature spectacle.

You wouldn't think there'd be much information the audience could extract from a one-minute dance, but Corbett's choreography and the eccentric musical selections (Bach, Brubeck, cha-cha-cha, you name it), combined with the talents of the performers themselves, yielded portraits that were entertaining, touching, and not without rigor. Moms and their kids complemented each other's skills, occasionally with a glint of rivalry. There were cool teenagers and enthusiastic seniors. One middle-aged couple had their disagreements; another lay down on their backs, as if to begin their daily calisthenics. One performer looked confident while her partner looked anxious. You could sometimes tell when a duo had a real-life relationship, but sometimes not.

I was so caught up in the different ways of solving a seemingly simple game plan, it took me a long time to realize that these diverse individuals were sharing a certain amount of movement material. In addition to incorporating the performers' particular skills, Corbett had created little motifs that recurred and held the assortment together. You'd notice a shaking-out wrist gesture when it coincided with some musical fillip, and then you'd see the same move a couple of sets down the line. There was a two-legged bouncing, fishtailing step that looked especially witty when two men did it side by side. A touching of your partner's shoulder could be a tap or a shove or a cue to change direction. In the final duet, Ted Clausen and Jay Rogers made contact fondly; then, after a love poem by Clausen, they waltzed away in silence.

In addition to Duets, Corbett premiered Quiet Line/Hiljainen Viiva, a dance for six women that she'd made during a residency at the Finnish Theater Academy in Helsinki. Wearing black summer dresses, all different, Leah Bergmann, Jimena Bermejo-Black, Maggie Husak, Kaela Lee, Meghan McLyman, and Nicole Pierce almost walked through what could have been the dance's basic movement material. They did low-key gestures, traveling moves, bends, and soft drops to the floor while on tape we heard the ambient sound of what could have been a department store, with an elevator operator announcing the floors in Finnish.

Maggie Husak began a more agitated, expansive dance in counterpoint to the others, who were revolving slowly in a contained line. One by one, the other women began to do Husak's movement, gradually shifting the mood from leisurely to pressured. After this transition, the dance went into high gear, to the irregular rhythms and steady pulsing of Steve Reich's Six Marimbas. The movement and the interplay of groupings and patterns all got more complicated. Then the music thinned out and stopped. The women were standing in another line-up, and as Leah Bergmann backed away from them, we heard a baby crowing.

2009: The year in dance You could say there were two tremendous forces that propelled dance into the world of modern culture: the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev and the choreography of Merce Cunningham.

From Mozart to milonga We Bostonians may swathe ourselves in sweaters and lock our doors against the blustery weather, but once the music begins, dance performances can help us shake off the shivers — and often transport us to more temperate climes.

New stuff One thing that impressed me was that dance invention seems to be making a comeback as a major challenge for young choreographers after years of being stirred into the multimedia stew.

Squiggles and lines The eponymous directors of Alonzo King Lines Ballet and the Mark Morris Dance Group both came from backgrounds in modern dance with sprinklings of other styles, and they both subsequently invented movement vocabularies to serve their choreographic ideas.

Flickers The hour's worth of film and dance that followed my absurdist journey offered flashbacks, edges, mysterious messages, and a thunderstorm. In 1924, Tristan Tzara described Dada as a resistance to the pretensions of art, "a snow of butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator." I left Inman Square feeling energized.

Old masters Last month, students at Boston Conservatory and Boston University paid tribute to two notables of modern dance's second generation in the best possible way: by performing their work.

High stepping The heavy-hitter repertory shows this season come from ALVIN AILEY and GEORGE BALANCHINE . But why not welcome spring by taking a chance on fresh experiences as well?

Reality riffs When Jerome Robbins's New York Export: Opus Jazz boogied onto the scene in 1958 then took Europe by storm. Created for Ballets: U.S.A., a company of ballet, modern, and jazz dancers that Robbins had put together for a government-sponsored cultural exchange tour, Opus Jazz was a kind of spinoff from the 1957 hit musical West Side Story , which Robbins directed and choreographed.

Airs and graces Somewhere in the middle of Stephen Petronio’s terrific hour-long dance I Drink the Air Before Me last Friday night, the dancers exited and the space went dark.

Happy returns George Balanchine didn’t go in for productions of the old classic ballets.

JOFFREY BALLET GETS ITS DUE | May 08, 2012 New York has two great ballet companies, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. Any other ballet troupe that wants to put down roots there has to develop a personality that's distinct from those two.

THE BOSTON BALLET’S DON QUIXOTE | May 01, 2012 In the long string of ballet productions extracted from Miguel de Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, the delusional Don has become a minor character, charging into situations where he shouldn't go and causing trouble instead of good works.